Nilay Patel wrote a clairvoyant piece in The Verge shortly after Elon Musk bought Twitter called Welcome to hell, Elon, welcoming Elon Musk to hell. Elon is in hell, the piece argues, because he is now the boss of content moderation at Twitter, and is tasked with balancing the unbalanceable…

I recall vividly the first time I saw a screenshot from ChatGPT. It was in this Tweet. I was instantly a complete hater. How is this so impressive, I wondered. Large language models, including GPT-3, which powers ChatGPT, had been around for a long time. GitHub’s Copilot product…

In R, if you run ?pie, you get a stern talking-to. > ?pie [...] Note: Pie charts are a very bad way of displaying information. The eye is good at judging linear measures and bad at judging relative areas. A bar chart or dot chart is a preferable way of…

In 2012, a story was published in the New York Times under the headline How Companies Learn Your Secrets. The article discusses, among other things, how and why a marketing team at Target tried to build a model to predict which shoppers were pregnant. …

Three Fundamental Things That Deep Learning Can’t Do — AI is a huge and vague term that means different things to different people, but everyone agrees about one thing: AI is the future. Soon enough, AI will be driving all of our Ubers and directing our Netflix specials and delivering our Amazon prime orders. …

In June 2017, a paper popped up by Jardim et. al at the National Bureau of Economic Research entitled Minimum Wage Increases, Wages, and Low-Wage Employment: Evidence From Seattle. This is the first of what will probably be many studies investigating the effects of the Seattle minimum wage changes, and…

The paper was posted to NBER a few days ago and has gotten quite a bit of attention. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be an ungated version floating around right now, but lots of universities have access to NBER papers by email so you might be able to get to…

A foray into the mathematics of NPS, complete with code for Excel and R — In my last piece about the Net Promoter Score and how it’s not a very useful metric in part due to the extremely wide confidence intervals that it generates, I wrote Anyone using anything at least as powerful as Excel should have no problem producing [NPS] standard errors and confidence…

Update: For those who wish to know how to find confidence intervals for the Net Promoter Score, I’ve written a guide complete with a downloadable spreadsheet or R code for doing just that. Hopefully someone out there can use that information to improve their NPS reporting with some measures of…